Marking of Elements Around a Hole

Altair Forum User

Hey guys,

 

I got a question concerning the following model. I want to move all the elements, which are surrounding the holes, into a component. Do you know a command how to mark them?

 

Thanks in advance,

Simon

 

Merula_20758

As I see it, there is no easy tcl command like *createmark to solve your issue as the wholes are not of the same shape (like all cylindrical holes could be easily selected with a 'by cylinder').

 

Well, all the elements, you want to select share one property: They are at the boundaries of your element set and they for a closed loop. So to select the elements you want, you have to do the following:

 

- read in all the elements which are there

- identify all elements with node ids, that are only referenced once in the entire element set (those are the boundary elements)

- identify all closed loops within that element set

 

You can do it with any programming language you like. Files to be processed are: the .fem file for getting the elements and nodes as well as the _des.h3d for getting the element densities.

 

If there is an easy solution for this, I would be greatly interested if someone could share the findings. The above process takes a while (but on the other hand is applicable for 2d and 3d as well)

 

All the best,

 

Merula

Alex Salido

Hi, 

This may come too late but I just came across this. 

If you go to Tool menu, edges, select the component and click 'find edges', HM will create a new component ('^edges') that would contain plot element representing the edge. 

Then if you select those plot elements and also the adjacent ones, you would have isolated the desired elements. From this you can isolate the selection, hide the ^edges component and move the remaining elements to a new component.

I hope this helps.